Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

Debian Developer Jon Dowland writes: "It appears I have switched for good. I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time, but I couldn’t quite get the words right. I doubted I could express my frustrations in a constructive, helpful way, even if I think that my experiences are useful and my discoveries valuable, perhaps I would put them across in a way that seemed inciteful rather than insightful. I wasn’t sure anyone cared. Certainly the GNOME community doesn’t seem interested in feedback." What can we say to that?

I don't look on the OpenBSD Misc mailing list very often, but today a message from that list introduced me to Neomailbox, which offers services that include secure, encrypted e-mail and anonymous web surfing for prices that are very reasonable.

I’ve been waiting for this: Hashover is a free-software project that aims to replace hosted-comments services like Disqus and those offered by Facebook and others that keep your comments in their database.

The tzdata package is updating in Fedora today, and just to show you how international politics — you know, when one country takes over another — can show up in a software update, take a look at the changelog entry.

Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity based in New York, announced today the addition of a talented new member of its management team. Karen M. Sandler, formerly Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, begins today as Conservancy's new Executive Director.

I was looking through the Fedora packages for Xfce applications I hadn't yet installed, and the Xfce Theme Manager came up. I installed it. Then I ran it. It screwed up my desktop.

I saw on the Fedora Xfce mailing list today that it looks like xfdashboard and xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin are coming to the Fedora Xfce spin's ISO, if not as default choices at least as things you can add to your desktop after the fact.

You've heard the "Rhythmbox is dead" rumors. At various times over the past few years, the GNOME-centric music player, which I favor even in non-GNOME environments, has been called out for a lack of development, and replacements have queued up to take its place.

In a move that surprises no one at this point, OpenBSD is in the process of pulling the Apache 1.3.x web server it has been maintaining on its own for what seems like forever and replacing it with the hot web server of the 2010s — nginx.

Rumbling around the Internet the past few days is talk about actor/geek icon Wil Wheaton‘s Google+ post about not being terribly in love with Ubuntu. At least he’s running it with Xfce. The post made its way to OMG Ubuntu! where it provoked much discussion. Much of it was of the “How dare he!” variety, though there were plenty of people who pointed out that the opinions of non-Linux users sampling today’s distros are extremely important.

You can knock me over with a feather right at this very moment: Mark Shuttleworth announced in his blog that Ubuntu will follow Debian in adopting systemd as its init system, even though Ubuntu itself coded the alternative Upstart.

Ever since I got suspend/resume working in Fedora 20, I've been rebooting maybe once a week. That's because I love suspend/resume. I love being able to close to laptop lid to put the machine to sleep and open the lid to wake it up. But since the battery was running low a few nights ago, I decided to do a full shutdown. I turned the laptop on the next day, and it wouldn't boot into Fedora proper. I couldn't get to the login screen.

Say what you will about the Anaconda installer, especially the new "hub and spoke" version (and much of what has been said is far from kind), but the ability to select any of the major desktops during the installation process is a win.

With the release of Fedora 21 delayed by at least three months due to the ramping up of the Fedora.Next initiative, the project's current release, Fedora 20, is likely to be the closest thing users will ever get to a "long-term support" release from the Red Hat-sponsored community project. And I plan to enjoy it.

It's all over the Fedora forums and mailing lists and bug trackers: A bad update is causing software updates to fail. Here's the easy fix.

So I figured I'd upgrade the Windows 8 portion of my Windows/Fedora dual-booting (and naturally EFI-running) system to the presumably shinier, newer Windows 8.1 with the offer of an upgrade via the Microsoft Store. Big mistake.

Thanks to the help of a few, proud Fedora users, I was able to install the AMD Catalyst 13.11 beta (version 9.95 to be exact) driver on my Xfce-running Fedora 20 system.bAnd thus the long local (as opposed to national) nightmare of poor video performance and a CPU running 30 to 40 degrees hotter is over.

I got a lot out of reading Michael Larabel's AMD Catalyst 2013 Linux Graphics Driver Year-In-Review on his Phoronix site. He's been following all of the Linux video drivers for years, and his perspective is very valuable, especially in his assessment that it's been a horrible year for the proprietary Catalyst driver and a great one for the open Radeon driver.

So the short story is that the maintainer of the proprietary AMD Catalyst (aka fglrx) driver for the Fedora-focused RPM Fusion repository doesn't want to do it anymore. And he made this decision not before the release of Fedora 20 with lots of notice, and not after (with lots of notice) BUT PRETTY MUCH DURING the release with no notice.

So I finally did my FedUp upgrade from Fedora 19 to 20, and one of the things hanging me up was the AMD Catalyst driver, the packages for which come from RPM Fusion. I should have looked into this more BEFORE I did the upgrade, because there are no kmod-catalyst packages for F20.